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Two cloaked figures sit in a field, separated by three small podiums.
The first is a statue of stone. Where a face would emerge from the hood is instead a broken rectangular symbol, worn deep by intention and shallow by time. It looms above an empty landscape, seeing nothing and unseen.
The second is a man that may well be a statue - flecks of crumbled stone dusting his hair, dark cloak slowly bleaching in patches where the sun finds purchase. His skin is pale despite the heat of the sun, though not as pale as it once was. The set of his eyes is deep and sunken.
A part of Scar wonders that he is still alive.
He has lost count of how long it’s been - how many times the sun has set and risen again, casting the shadow of the Secret Keeper as a sundial across him. He tried to keep the tally, but it made the ache worse.
No creatures of the night have found him in the quiet nights; the altar of the Secret Keeper is too well-lit, too warded. Or perhaps they do not sense him as a thing that is alive anymore. His heartbeat is too faint to tempt them, even as it still moves a steady rhythm inside. Not even the phantoms can find him.
He does not - can not, perhaps - move, so he does not starve. He wastes, and hungers, but the ache is a dull and familiar friend by now. Perhaps the only one he has left.
The stone at Scar’s back is warm. Or he is cold. They feel one and the same. Equally alive and not. The only difference is that Scar knows there once was more than this.
Grian had told him once, casually, that the winners remember where others forget. It seems he’d forgotten to mention - or perhaps did not know - that they remember everything that came before.
Scar, as the last to win, remembered it all.
Twenty-five deaths. Thirty-seven kills.
Four ends.
Martyn had been on a timer. Even the last bits stolen from Scott and Impulse couldn’t save him for very long, and he’d known that. Welcomed it with open arms.
Pearl could not outlive the sacrifice that granted her victory. Bound to a man whose act of redemption was to make sure it was quick, that they would not suffer.
Scott was given only moments. Under the moonlight, one could almost see the ghostly hand wrap itself around his soul and pull it free to join the others.
Grian had stared at his hands, covered in Scar’s blood, shoved his way past the cactus ring, and flung himself off a cliff.
But Scar has nothing but time.
Scar is, as he had been the whole season, alone.
Scar has called for the ghosts to take him, and heard only the wind in the grass.
And Scar had flung himself from the Secret Keeper, and broken his leg on the success marker; healing it without setting, unable to die.
There has been changes. Time moves; it is not frozen. He and the world both are still breathing.
Rain falls, thunder claps. Bugs scuttle to and fro. Grass grows, and dies, and grows again.
The moss crawls across the ground as a living thing in a living world, and over anything that moves slower than it - that which is still. It curls over the Secret Keeper and the victor’s podium and Scar with all equal indifference, and more follows. Ivy sways in a necklace handing low across his chest. One leaf brushes the underside of his chin.
The growing greenery has snaked the seeds from the flowers on his cloak, and the breeze has loosened them to find their own soil. A few even grow from the podium above him, their roots winding into the mechanisms that damn him with life. Their perfume wafts down to Scar, fresh and vibrant next to the aged and gentle scent of their ancestors sewn onto the lining. Full of memories.
Poppies are not native to this part of the grasslands. Perhaps, in time, they will be.
Scar fears he will have the chance to find out how long that takes.
It cannot be much longer, the whisper of a mind soothes itself, it cannot be.
There will be another game soon. There will be another victor. There will be someone who remembers all that came before.
They will remember him. Wonder where he is. Where they lost him.
They will look to find him again.
And Scar has been here, and is here, and will be here. At the edge of the stone, in the center of the garden.
Waiting.